So if you want to put yourself on the path to the C-Suite in a Fortune 500 company or to a partnership in a major law firm, you have to get into one of the very top colleges in the country. That, in turn, means top colleges can charge pretty much whatever they want and it's still worth the money. Not because of the instruction students receive, but because getting admitted is highly competitive and those students managed to do it. In other words, it's a positive feedback loop driving up prices for a scarce resource.
Even when you get out of the nosebleed tier, colleges are easy to rank by their accept/reject ratio. So if you're a big employer and you have a candidate from Brown (acceptance 9.5%) and one from Cornell (acceptance 15.1%), you'd probably prefer the one from Brown, everything else being equal.
The sad part is adding more money just makes the problem worse for the same reason adding money to real estate markets just makes everything more expensive.
The most prestigious colleges actually don't charge much money, except for families that can easily pay. Financial aid, including stipends for living expenses, is extremely generous at elite schools. The sticker price might be high, but few people actually pay it.
The problem is more with second tier schools that aspire to greater prestige but have more limited financial resources. While many of these schools offer perfectly good educations, they don't really open the same kind of doors that going to a more elite school can. A big tuition price can make parents think they're sending their kid to a really elite school - just like people often will assume a more expensive diamond ring is better than a less expensive one. But it's probably not really worth the money.
So instead I only applied to in-state colleges, thinking I was being sensible and pragmatic by doing so. But there's a chance I would have paid less at the top tier schools than I ended up paying for local schools.
It's an example of how inequality along financial or racial lines can be real despite there being no theoretical reason for it: if you don't know that you could attend a top tier university and leave with very little debt, you'll consider applying as a student. If you don't, then you've preemptively rejected a very good opportunity for upward mobility. Too many people just don't know because their families or communities don't play the college admissions "game."
If the minimum barrier to employment is having a college degree, then people will continue doing whatever they have to in order to get a college degree.
The only way you're going to change demand is if decent jobs start being created that don't require a bachelor's degree. And I don't see that happening...
Everything about our country is one big lie.
College is oversold but the American Dream is alive if you go to a cheap school and buy a house in a smaller city or burbs. There are plenty of great cities and emerging ones with jobs and reasonable cost of living.
However, if you choose to buy crap you don't need and succomb to debt, that's not America's fault. That's yours.
But yes it's dead in LA, NYC and SF. You have to be a top performer there. But that's just supply and demand. Nobody owes you the American Dream in those cities. You aren't entitled to it.
Which cities? How long will it be until they too turn into LA, NYC, and SF (While being surrounded by oceans of hopelessness and poverty)?
You're so hung up on the CEO thing which is irrelevant. We don't need more CEOs just like we don't need more lawyers and doctors. And you mention doctors - those are needed in any town of size anyway. My own grandfather was a doctor in a rather small town outside of Little Rock and he did very well for himself and sent 4 kids to college, one to med school. His son is doing the same thing now as a doctor in Memphis.
The American Dream is alive and well: it's just changed. It's no longer "graduate college, get a good job, buy a home and be set for retirement"
Too many people just aren't adapting and are frustrated because they are sinking themselves with poor decisions like crippling debt.
I know people w 200k school debt that graduated with degrees targeting jobs that tap out at around 80k that are way more competitive than any tech or marketing occupation. Makes no sense.
My uncle makes 100+k selling tools out of a town of 6k people. My father in law makes 150k+ in HVAC out of a suburb of about 50k people. They both own their homes outright. One didn't go to college.
People don't want to learn general crafts like sales and they don't want to learn crafts that get their hands dirty. Their parents keep pushing them into college which provides less and less value and tons of debt.
The American Dream doesn't go away just because less people are realizing it. It goes away because people are being stubborn and we have a nation of financially ignorant and wreckless citizens.
I've just driven out to Whidbey Island this past weekend - a 70 minute drive from Seattle. Beautiful place. Economically, it's also dying, and not because the people who live there are lazy bastards. If it didn't have a US Navy base, it would be dead. As a young person, you'd be insane to stay there.
In order to feed your uncle and father-in-law, small towns must have something to export.
It could be lumber. It could be coal. It could be applications for social security. It could be people, who work in the city, and live in their community, 40 miles away. But it has to be something.
Small towns that have an export - one big enough to feed all the doctors, cops, plumbers, politicians, realtors, teachers, babysitters, bricklayers, HVAC installers, and other people who bring no money into their economy can do reasonably well for themselves.
Those that don't are in a death spiral, and it won't matter if you replaced every person in them with a skilled contractor overnight.
1) the American Dream has included a college education as a general requirement for quite some time now. People that live in small towns, esp. mid-sized ones that rely on Naval bases or other similar economic drivers as the example you provided generally aren't part of this group
2) it ignores that the Dream is alive and well elsewhere
Nobody should expect to get a college education and go live in any given town and be set for life. That's not practical. Economies change, but the opportunities are still out there.
If you believe people should be entitled to make a living wherever they grow up (or choose) forever, then yes the American Dream doesn't exist because your expectations are out of line with capitalism.
That's not fair; it's alive if you aren't stubborn with occupational choices and where you live. It sucks to move but people need to get over that fear.
I do. At the lower end, if employers can't afford to pay people enough to make their loan payments, they'll start hiring people without debt.
The worry I have is that if the automation worries are born out, then you're going to have an inflexible debt loan (student loans) meeting a market that offers fewer jobs (due to automation).
I think you've misunderstood what you're hearing: low cost college by definition can't be the cause of high cost college.
The claim is that high availability of funds/liquidity for college is what pushes up prices,since there are more dollars available to chase a supply that hasn't kept pace[1].
> college is free in many countries where they are doing quite well. So I question the facile opinions I keep hearing.
This doesn't really make any sense. Colleges that are provided for free are a lot less dependent on markets to determine prices: they treat them like a more or less generic public good (where college choice is determined by quality of student more than ability to pay).
[1] strictly speaking, the supply hasn't been that constrained, but since college is largely perceived as a positional good, this affects all but the bottom rung for-profit colleges.
Exactly. It's no different to what causes a real estate bubble: Extremely low interest rates and lax lending policies make borrowed cash very cheap, which pushes up the amount that the average buyer can 'afford' to borrow.